


Soft

by galpalaven



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Pining, Pre-Relationship, Shepard Cousins AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-13
Updated: 2017-11-13
Packaged: 2019-02-01 18:11:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12710226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galpalaven/pseuds/galpalaven
Summary: Her skin is—soft.He doesn’t know why it surprises him. He’s known for most of his life that humans are vulnerable, with no natural plating or armor, but it had never crossed his mind that their skin might not feel like his. He wants desperately for a moment to touch more of her face, to reach around and cup her cheeks in his palms, to trace the implants with the pads of his fingers, to feel her, feel her warmth and her life and cement the fact to himself that she’s alive.





	Soft

Garrus isn’t sure what started it, exactly. 

He can’t pinpoint an exact moment—a look, a phrase—that was the tipping point for this little  _infatuation_  of his. It had been there before she’d died, buried beneath a little semi-healthy idolization (and how could he not idolize her? The woman was a machine on the battlefield and the most inspiring, dedicated commander he’d ever served under). They were simple, passing thoughts back then—admiring the fire in her gaze just before they made a drop for a mission, warmth spreading through his fingers at the sound of her laugh. The time back on the SR-1 he’d ended up sprawled beneath her with her astride his waist because he didn’t take the predatory gleam in her eye seriously when she’d bet she could beat him in hand-to-hand combat  _probably_  had nothing to do with it.

It’s not until after they’re reunited on Omega, that he can pinpoint where the infatuation turned into something a little deeper, a little more real.

He wakes to her voice sometime after taking the rocket to the face, a shaky plea for him to pull through. When he starts to come back to consciousness, little by little, he finds them alone in the med bay, and she’s rambling about something or other. It’s nothing important (she keeps trailing off in the middle of her sentences and starting over again), but he watches her face anyway, still unable to quite believe that she’s really back. Her hair is longer than he’s ever seen it, and her scar on her eyebrow is gone, replaced by strange little glowing lines. As he watches, a few drops of water fall from her eyes and roll down her cheeks, and her voice catches.

He’s still drugged, so he doesn’t think about it before his hand moves. He brushes the back of his knuckle across her cheek, catching the tears and effectively stopping her complaints in their tracks.

Her skin is— _soft_.

He doesn’t know why it surprises him. He’s known for most of his life that humans are vulnerable, with no natural plating or armor, but it had never crossed his mind that their skin might not feel like his. He wants desperately for a moment to touch more of her face, to reach around and cup her cheeks in his palms, to trace the implants with the pads of his fingers, to  _feel_  her, feel her warmth and her life and cement the fact to himself that she’s  _alive_.

The urge to touch doesn’t fade after he’s allowed out of the med bay either.

If anything, it gets worse—especially after she gets her hair cut again, and buys some casual clothes to wear around the Normandy in between missions.

He’s minding his own business one day when it happens. She’s reaching for something in the rec room, the book or whatever a little out of reach so that she has to stretch, and her shirt rides up, revealing a strip of smooth, tan skin on her lower belly, and dizzyingly his gaze catches on the jut of her hipbones, and the shape they made just above her belt. He wonders if that skin would be just as soft as the skin on her face, if he pulled his gloves off and pressed his palms to her stomach if he’d be met with more silk.

Garrus shakes off those thoughts when she drops back down to the flats of her feet, smiling up at him as she passes by.

 _Spirits_.

 

* * *

 

It haunts him, a little bit, as they continue on their mission to find the Collectors and bring them down. He finds himself more and more distracted by her—her smile, the sound of her laughter, the way she cocks her hip to the side and tilts her head when she looks at him sometimes in the battery.

It doesn’t help that she seems to spend a lot of time hanging around in there with him—for the first few days after he’s allowed out of the med bay, she barely leaves his side but to sleep or bathe. He asks why once, why she spends all her time in here with him when Joker and Dr. Chakwas are also on board, but she just shrugs from where she’s made herself comfortable on his workbench, swinging her legs where they don’t touch the ground and sliding her finger across the screen of the data pad she’s reading.

 _“I missed you,”_ is about all the answer he gets. She says something else about not trusting the Cerberus crew, but that falls flat when she looks up at him and smiles, soft and sweet.  _“But it’s mostly the ‘I missed you’, part_.”

He laughs at that and has to bite back just how much he’d missed her, these past two years. How much it had hurt, losing her. How he’d technically left his job because he just couldn’t take the reminders anymore of how he’d failed her, and not just because he’d gotten fed up with all the red tape like he’d said. He wants to tell her his last thought before calling his dad before she’d shown up to help him was of her, of looking forward to the possibility of seeing her again in the afterlife.

But he can’t.

He can’t bring himself to say any of it, voice caught somewhere in his chest as his heart flutters at the look on her face, the warmth and sincerity in her eyes.

He’d doubted, just a little, when she’d first shown up, if she was really there. He’d wondered if she wasn’t a figment of his imagination, a friendly face for him to be the last thing he saw in this life, but then she’d started punching mercs and he’d realized either he was hallucinating, or she was  _real_. Or, real enough—a close duplication, a VI or a synthetic replication of some kind that just had his friend’s face, but looking at her now…

She’s really Sun. There’s no doubt in his mind that the woman curling up on his workbench and popping some kind of crunchy snack in her mouth as she goes back to reading is his old friend, his  _Commander Shepard_. Whatever Cerberus did, they’d really brought her back to life. All of her. Even her spirit.

His fingers itch with the urge to—to  _touch_  again and he has to face another thought.

Somewhere along the way, he’s developed  _feelings_  for her.

It explains so much, really, he thinks as he pretends to work on the guns. It explains how much he’d cared about her wellbeing (enough to hook her vitals up to his visor so that he always knew if she was hurt or not), how much it had hurt when he’d lost her. It explains the way her laughter makes him feel lighter than normal, the way his heart beats a little harder when she comes to visit or she smiles at him a certain way.

And it explains his sudden, inexplicable want to be closer to her, in every possible way. It explains the urge to touch her skin again, to find an excuse to touch her. Explains the dream he can only remember flashes of from the other night about her many flexible little fingers digging into his neck and his nose buried in the soft, bare skin of her shoulder.

There are so many ways this crush could go wrong that it’s not even anywhere near funny, but he can’t help himself. He’s attracted to her, and he’s  _been_  attracted to her for probably much longer, and there’s no way to argue or fight it now. He’ll just have to ride it out, and hope it doesn’t interfere with their friendship. Or the mission.

And may the spirits have mercy on him if it does, because he’s not ready to lose his friend again so soon. It’d surely crush his fragile will to live if she found out about these thoughts and hated him for it.

 

* * *

 

When they fight about Sidonis, he almost forgets these thoughts.

_“You sure this will make things better, Garrus? I mean, are you really going to kill Sidonis?”_

_“I’m surprised you’d say that, Shepard, considering you’re the one who taught me that sometimes killing is the best option.”_

_Something angry and hot flared in her eyes and, teeth bared, she snarled,_ “ _You know damn well what I meant when I said sometimes killing is the best option, Garrus, and I_ wasn’t _talking about_   _cowards who sold their friends out to mercs!_   _You’re so damn smart, Vakarian, just use your brain for ten seconds! You’re a grown-ass man._ I _shouldn’t be your moral compass.”_

_“Then why are we still arguing about this?” fell out of his mouth before he could stop it._

_The anger solidified in her eyes and she set her jaw, turning away to look back out at the loading area where Harkin was definitely hiding. “Whatever. Let’s get moving.”_

_…_

_“This isn’t you, Gare. Look at him. He’s already paying for this.”_

_“Not enough. He still has his life.”_

_“This isn’t living, Garrus. Let it go.”_

_“I don’t need you to understand, Shepard, but I do need you to_ get out of my shot _.”_

 _“…How about you come down here and_ make me _.”_

She stops off on Alchera directly afterward, avoiding him at all costs (by going somewhere she’d been avoiding for weeks, he notes distantly), leaving him time to stew in his anger for a bit.

It’s faded by the time she returns to the ship, but he doesn’t come out to see her. He’ll let her come to him.

And she does, almost immediately later that night, when he’s still up and has forgotten to lock the door. They talk about their mission over a nightcap, and it all comes unraveled again as she settles close to his side, leaning against the console beside him. She’s such a small woman, he thinks, and his mind is providing him calculations on how easy it’d be for him to lift her onto the console and find out just how soft her skin really is as he tells her some story about turian ships before big missions. Already in the gutter, his mind immediately provides her with the example of his most recent experience in the bedroom—a good while ago now.

She grins crookedly, but it doesn’t meet her eyes all the way. Tilting her head, several unreadable expressions cross her face before settling on something soft as she says, “You know, you’ve been a little tense lately. If you want, maybe I could help with that.”

Oh,  _spirits_ , the way his heart leaps at the suggestive undertone to her voice, and he wants so desperately for this to be a come on— _a flash of toned thighs covered in that same soft, golden skin wrapped tightly around his waist_ —but he thinks that might be too much to hope for, especially since they’ve just fought. He gives her a chance to change her mind, to run, and she just shakes her head.

“I was thinking we could jump straight to the tiebreaker. Test your reach, and my  _flexibility_.”

 _Yes_.  _Yes, Shepard, yes,_ ** _spirits_** _, yes._

He tries to play it cool, to not seem overeager and it mostly works. Her face turns red when he says the words, “ _Yeah. Definitely_.” It’s a little awkward then, neither of them sure where to go from there, but she sighs and saves him the trouble of coming up with something.

“I should…get some rest. And Garrus?”

“Yes, Shepard?”

She looks up at him for a moment, before smiling and reaching up to tug on his cowl so that she can press her forehead to his.

He’s going to faint.

He goes a little rigid, wondering if she knows what this sort of move means, and thinking she can’t because how could she. He clears his throat a little and says, “So…this is…intimate.”

He can feel her forehead move against his as she furrows her brow a split second before she releases him again, frowning up at him as she steps away. “Is it?”

Garrus nods and taps the spot where his brow plates meet. “Yeah, this spot here is a weak point, where a lot of nerve endings come together. Highly sensitive. If you see two turians touching foreheads like that, well…”

“Huh.” She purses her lips and sighs. “Sorry. I picked that up from my dad, I think. Or maybe my godmother? Or, well, it’s a friendly greeting in some cultures on Earth and I—” She shakes her head. “Nevermind. Sorry if I made you uncomfortable.”

He laughs a little at the thought.  _If only she knew…_  “Not uncomfortable—just thought you might want to know. You know, to avoid giving the wrong idea.”

The last thing she says before she says goodnight is, “Who said it would be the wrong idea?” and he’s so shocked by the sound of that and the implications of it that he almost can’t see the extra, hypnotic sway in her hips as she saunters from his room.

The door slides shut behind her, and Garrus spends the next few days wondering if that had actually happened, or if he’d just made the whole damn thing up. And if it  _had_  happened, what if she’d just been buzzed? What if it was just fun and she didn’t mean it?

…What if she  _did_  mean it?

 

* * *

 

When they next get the chance to speak privately, he offers her the chance to rescind her offer, albeit awkwardly.

“I’ve been thinking about…what we talked about. Blowing off steam…easing tension. Are we crazy to even be  _thinking_  about this? I’m not su…Look, Shepard, I know you can find something a little closer to home.”

He expects her to agree, shrug it off and go back to just being his commander, maybe go flirt with the drell assassin they’d just picked up, but she smiles instead and says, “I don’t  _want_  something closer to home, Garrus. I want you.” She almost leaves it at that, and he feels his eyes widen, hope leaping in his chest until something in her eyes drops and she clears her throat, looking away to add, “I want someone I can trust.”

“I can do that,” he says, because he can. He can be that, because he trusts her, too—he’d trust her with her hand around his beating heart, truthfully. “I’ll find some music and do some research to figure out how this thing should work. It’ll either be a night to treasure or a horrible interspecies awkwardness thing.”

She snorts and they both fall silent for a tense moment, before he coughs and adds, “In which case, fighting the Collectors will be a welcome distraction. So, you know, a win either way.”

Something in her eyes falters, and she tilts her head, keeping her arms crossed where she stands before him. “You know, Garrus, if you’re not comfortable with this, it’s okay.” Her eyes drop to his chest. “I’m not trying to pressure you.”

Uncomfortable? That’s what she thinks?

“Shepard,” he sighs, stepping closer and reaching for a stray bit of fuzz on her shirt. An excuse to touch without really touching. “You’re about the only friend I’ve got left in this screwed up galaxy.” His hand hovers, uncertain, and he can feel the warmth radiating from her through his glove. “I’m not gonna pretend I’ve got a fetish for humans,” he continues hesitantly, wondering briefly if that’s as much of a lie as it feels, “but this isn’t about that.” That makes her giggle and duck her head, and when she looks back up, she’s still not looking at his face, but she’s smiling and biting into her lower lip. Bracing himself, he drops his hand to her shoulder and squeezes gently. “This is about  _us_. You don’t ever have to worry about making me uncomfortable.  _Nervous_ , maybe…but never uncomfortable.”

Sun smiles at him, reaches up and grabs his hand in hers, stepping closer and focusing on that as she asks about when she should book the room. He tells her to plan for the night before the Omega 4 Relay, mostly because he’s not sure he’ll be able to deal if it doesn’t work, partly because he’s still expecting her to change her mind. Plus, it does sound nice to wait and savor that last night, even if the heat sink metaphor he uses hits straight in the gutter.

Her smile is the last thing he thinks of that night, and it doesn’t occur to him to be embarrassed by that until much, much later.

 

* * *

 

The first time she offers to kiss him, he nearly ends up telling her ‘screw it, let’s go up to your cabin  _now_ ’, but  _just_ manages to keep himself in check.

It’s his own fault, really. He’d noticed a bruise on the neck of one of the crewmen, and he’d asked her about it (he told her his ‘research’ had mentioned it, but he was still putting that off, uncomfortable with looking up porn because he wanted to have sex with his commanding officer— _damn, that still sounds weird that way_ ). He’d just wanted her to explain, but because she’s Shepard, she does him one better.

She offers to give him a ‘hickey’.

He stutters and stammers and she just smiles at him and says, “Garrus, believe it or not, I do actually want to kiss you.”

His eyes drop to the curve of her mouth, to those full, pink lips, and he’s vaguely aware that he’s still talking. Her teeth aren’t sharp like his, but he’s still not sure about letting her just take a bite out of his neck—what if she does it too hard? What if she makes him bleed? What if—?

She interrupts his thoughts by reaching out and grasping him by the front of his shirt, reeling him in with a soft sigh. “Gare, if you don’t like it, you can tell me to stop, okay?” He must not look convinced, even distracted as he is by  _Gare_ , because she reaches for his hands then, squeezing gently. “It’s just me, Garrus. I’ve got you.”

Something about the way she says  _I’ve got you_  sends his tension melting away, the sense that he is completely and totally safe replacing the nerves because this is  _Shepard_  and when has Shepard  _ever_  hurt him? Even when they spar, she’s never hurt him and when she’d showed up on Omega, he’d felt the same way. Shepard wouldn’t let anything happen to him; Shepard would get him out of anything if it killed her. And sure, he’d taken a rocket to the face, but she’d still—

His thoughts screech to a halt when her lips, soft and plush, press gently to his cheek, lingering as her thumbs trace tiny circles into the backs of his hands. Slowly, slowly she presses more kisses along his jaw, letting her lips drag against his mandible as her breath washes over his skin, hot and humid, and he shudders, the strangeness of the sensation overridden by the pleasure of having her so close. She presses another kiss below the last, a little deeper as she guides his hands to her thighs.

He sighs at her touch, tension slowly easing because this isn’t as weird as he’d feared, and is just as nice as he’d hoped. Garrus lets his hands wander over the exposed muscle on her legs—so strong, he wonders again how they’d feel locked around his waist. He jumps just slightly when her fingers brush over the cloth on his waist, unhesitant and unapologetic, but gentle and still slow, like she’s trying to ease him into this. He can feel the curve of her lips as she smiles, and his hands reflexively tighten on her legs.

She kisses him, again and again, and he can feel his temperature climbing right here in the battery, head tilting to bare his throat to her without a second thought, subvocals thrumming low with contentment and anticipation. He can’t remember the last time he had someone’s mouth so close to his throat, the last time he trusted anyone to touch him quite like this—if ever. His hands are trembling as they slide a little closer to her hips, aching to press completely into her, pull her into his arms and—

Garrus has opened his mouth to say something, he’s not sure what, when she finally bites him, blunt human teeth sinking into his hide. As she sucks lightly, she digs her fingers into a particularly sensitive spot on his waist as her other hand pulls at his collar to bare more of his throat to her mouth, and he can’t quite stop the rumble of need that rips from his chest at the sensation. Breath coming heavy now, heartbeat pounding in his eardrums, desperation pitches his subvocals up a note or two when she twists her tongue into the spot where she’d nipped, and suddenly the room is on fire.

And he wants this—he  _wants_  this, he wants  _her_ —more than he can ever remember wanting anything in his life. His hands seek out her waist, and he dizzyingly notes that his fingers nearly touch with a hand on either side as he turns his head and mouths at her neck, mimicking, gentle as he can. He’s still nervous, still scared to hurt her, but  _spirits_ , she’s so warm and she’s laughing in his arms and her skin is  _so_ —

The salt of her skin surprises him, as does the whimper she gives as his tongue curls around the shell of her ear.

“Garrus?” Shepard’s voice has deepened to something rougher and husky, and he sighs as it sends heat curling low in his gut. “Are we, ah, still waiting until the last minute to… _blow off steam_?”

That gives him pause, and he makes an effort to step back out of the haze of lust clouding his mind. Sun is half wrapped around him now, thighs cradling his hips where he stands in front of her. Part of him wants to say no, to say to hell with it, toss her over his shoulder and carry her straight up to her cabin without caring who sees, but…

Garrus pulls back to look at Shepard then. There’s something bright in her familiar brown eyes, something exciting in the flush of red across her cheeks, and he fiddles with the hem of her shirt on her hips, wishing not for the first time that he wasn’t wearing gloves.

But there is still the part of him that’s terrified of being a disappointment, of hurting her, of  _screwing up_. He’s seen so many things go wrong, failed at so many things he’s ever tried—he couldn’t bear it if he failed at this, too.

She sees the decision in his eyes before he has to say it out loud, and she smiles anyway, fingers tracing soft little circles into his waist. “That’s okay,” she murmurs and, after a moment of apparently warring with herself over something, she leans in and presses her lips, quick and light, directly to the plates on his mouth. “I can wait.”

He leans in again, lets her kiss him once, twice, three more times before they say goodnight. He’s still unreasonably warm when he tries to sleep, can still feel the ghost sensation of her lips on his skin as he lies in the dark and listens to the quiet thrumming of the guns. There’s an uncomfortable pressure behind his plates that makes him shift every once in a while, praying that the problem will alleviate itself before he has to take matters into his own hands. Not that he’s worried about intrusions or anything, just—he’s not sure he’s ready to cross that line yet.

Not…not yet.

 

* * *

 

Turians don’t blush, as a general rule. They can get embarrassed, sure, or agitated, or annoyed, or whatever. Blushing is for other people—for asari or humans—people who  _aren’t_   _turian_.

The way Garrus’s face seems to get warmer and warmer the longer this goes on, however, says otherwise.

(Then again, he’s never been a very good turian, has he? A good turian wouldn’t even be in this situation to  _begin with_. A good turian doesn’t  _want to bang aliens_ ….well, unless they’re asari, apparently. Hm.)

Joker’s laughter has been ongoing for a solid 30 seconds now, by Garrus’s count, and he shifts his weight awkwardly, looking away as the pilot clutches at his stomach in pure mirth. His voice has hit a pitch Garrus wasn’t aware it  _could_  hit as he wipes dramatically at the tears that have begun to leak from his eyes, and Garrus starts to wonder what exactly he’d expected to happen when he came to  _Joker_  with this—er, subject.

After another tense moment, Joker’s laugh dies off, and with disbelief in his voice, he asks, “Wait, are you  _serious_? You wanna—the  _Commander_?”

Garrus rolls his eyes and fixes them on a blinking light on the wall. “Is it  _that_  unbelievable?”

Joker chuckles at that. “Well,  _no_. I don’t think there’s a person on this ship that hasn’t thought about it at least once. Well, except Kira, of course, but, I mean—you guys, like, what— _talked_  about it or something? Like, she wants to do you? For real?”

Garrus sighs roughly, bringing a hand up to cover his eyes. “Can you help me or not? Because my next option is Mordin, and I really—”

“Oh,  _shit_ , no, you don’t wanna do that. I’ll—tell you what, I’ll send some vids your way and see if that helps. Other than that, I mean—girls like flowers and wine and shit. I dunno. They seem to like it when men dress up for them, too, sometimes.”

“Sometimes.”

“Do I look like an expert? I could break my pelvis from some light, over-the-clothes action, Garrus. I don’t have as much experience as you seem to think I do.”

Well. That’s a good point. Fidgeting, Garrus sighs again and nods. “Sorry, I just—you’re my closest friend on board right now, besides Shepard. Or, well, I wouldn’t ever ask  _Tali_  about this.”

Joker laughs again, turning back to the flight monitor. “No, I don’t think that would go over very well. I’ll look around and find some—uh, helpful vids for you.”

“Thanks,” Garrus drawls as he turns and heads back out of the cockpit. A new, strange knot of anxiety settles just beneath his ribcage, and he wonders if he’s even going to be able to sit through a few “informational” vids at all. It’s—it makes him feel dirty, to watch something like that while thinking of her. He’s not—turians don’t really—or, well,  _he’s_  never really been the type to fantasize like that. He’s never really needed the extra visuals—his imagination worked just fine for that. And, well, sometimes he got lucky and found himself serving somewhere he could find another turian to destress with.

As he tries not to look too nervous walking back to the battery, his eyes catch someone else’s—Sun’s cousin, Kira, is sitting at a table in the mess, with Tali and Kasumi. She smiles when their eyes meet, and he goes to smile back weakly, when he notices that Tali and Kasumi are biting back giggles.

_…Damn it._

**Author's Note:**

> dunno if or when I'll ever finish this but I uploaded it for N7 day and everyone on tumblr enjoyed it so!!


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